Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope

by Sarah Bakewell

Mitigating the suffering of one’s fellows is a humanistic goal in the broadest sense, and in general the practice of medicine straddles the worlds of science and of humanistic study. It uses quantifiable research (far more so now than in Fracastoro’s day) but also patients’ personal accounts of what they feel; a working doctor must know how to listen and talk well with those patients. Medicine deals in observable and experienced phenomena. But it also relies on books: knowledge is passed from practitioner to practitioner through education and the sharing of professional experience. Like other sciences, it explicitly deploys the humanities, especially history, so as to reflect on its own past and to refine its approach. Far more than other sciences, it draws on contemporary prevailing ideas of who and what we are as humans, and generally as living beings. In return, medicine helps to change what we are, as we become (hopefully) more knowledgeable about our own systems and ultimately able to meddle a little with our own basic chemistry and processes.